How to low level format a windows 7 hard drive in recovery/installation mode?

windows-7 windows hard-drive

7,818

You can't practically "low level format" a modern hard drive. In order to do this you would need to get special information from the drive vendor which is not commonly available, and even if you do get this, low level formatting will not solve your problems - indeed it will make it worse.

Whoever was advising you is unqualified to be giving you advice, as they are either making things up as they go along, or are relying on knowledge which is about 30 years old ! (You used to low level format the earliest PC hard drives, using a debugger and a command "g=c800:5" for a Seagate 20 MEG drive under DOS - but that is ancient trivia)

If you want to clear everything off your drive and "start fresh", you can get a Linux distro, boot it from a USB drive, and issue the command "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1024 count=1024 - this will overwrite the first 1 meg of the disk, and wipe out all the partition and formatting information from the drive, essentially making an OS see the drive as uninitialized. NOTE: YOU WILL NEED TO REINSTALL WINDOWS OFF ALTERNATIVE MEDIA AS THIS PROCESS WILL WIPE ANY RESTORE PARTITION ON YOUR COMPUTER.

Also, When I said /dev/sdX, the "X" refers to the appropriate drive. You will need to identify the drive prior to issuing this command, as it is likely both the USB drive and hard drive(s) will be in the form /dev/sdX. You may be able to do this by typing "dmesg | grep "sd" and looking at the results to work out if its /dev/sda, /dev/sdb or whatever. (There are alternatives to doing this, like repeating hdparm -i /dev/sda, to identify the disks.

7,818

Akidus

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Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Akidus over 1 year

What the safest way is to low level format my hard drive in my Desktop Vostro 200 Dell Windows 7 computer? It' wont load the hard drive and I was told to low level format it.

It can only start the windows 7 installation disk and recovery options, so I want to know how to low level format the drive.
- whs about 8 years
  
  Did they also tell you what they mean by "low level formatting".
- Ramhound about 8 years
  
  DBAN works but if the hdd isn't functional that's an entirely different horse to take to the glue factory
- Akidus about 8 years
  
  @whs No. They told me just to do it.
- conquistador about 8 years
  
  Who told that? Some computer wizard who still believes formatting a PC solves every problem you have? May be you should write your problem here (real problem that "requires" you to do low level format) :)
- DavidPostill about 8 years
  
  What is the XY problem?. What is the real problem you are trying to solve?
- Akidus about 8 years
  
  To fix the keep restarting problem.
- Moab about 8 years
  
  Please post your real problem with specific details please.